WHETHER PUTTING on a large-scale production in its big theater or a less ambitious one in the studio space, College of Marin's drama department rarely falters. Alan Ball's "Five Women Wearing the Same Dress" is another entertaining and nicely executed show that achieves a level of comedic professionalism beyond what anyone should reasonably expect from a student production.

The five women in question are bridesmaids at a wedding reception in an upscale home in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1990. They gather in the upstairs bedroom of the bride's would-be radical punk sister Meredith (Amanda Eckstut) to drink champagne, smoke pot and trash most of the other guests. Looking out the window, Meredith says "I hope something really sick happens today."

In stiff, puffy and hilariously unflattering pink dresses by costume designer Jennifer O'Neill, they confess many indiscretions, and with a massive outpouring of self-deprecating humor, gossip and gush about the gathering's single and not-so-single men, at least one of whom, the unseen but much spoken-about Tommy Valentine, seems to have bedded every woman within 100 miles.

In her preshow speech, director Molly Noble reminded the audience that in 1990 the Internet had yet to arrive, mobile phones were the size of bricks and existed mostly in cars, and the AIDS crisis was in full bloom — something alluded to in Ball's script, but not mentioned explicitly.

Apart from those details "Five Women" is very much in the present. Except for Frances (Chandra Gordon), a bright-eyed true-believer Christian, the bridesmaids harbor many doubts about the ritual they've just been part of, and the society that supports it. One of them, Georgeanne (Melanie Bandera-Hess) blandly states that she and her husband haven't slept together in more than a year, and admits that the lack of love in her marriage contributed to her recent tryst "next to a Dumpster" with one of the wedding guests. Meredith's close friend Trisha (Elexa Poropudas), wise-beyond-her-years, has lost count of the number of men she's been with, but is still eager for her next drug-, drink- and sex-filled adventure in a cheap motel. And the bride's workplace friend Mindy (Shawn Oda) isn't interested in men at all, preferring instead playmates with what she calls "a nice set of hooters."

In her director's notes, Noble refers to the show as an "empowering bookend to Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," a valid observation given the liberating trajectory of women in the 20th century. Only 40 years separate the two plays, but the characters in "Five Women" have almost incomprehensibly greater options and independence than does Williams' Blanche DuBois, a reality that they seem to have absorbed without having given much thought to the implications. "Five Women" is also a comedic companion piece to "Steel Magnolias," both of them ensemble efforts mining the resilient essence of Southern women.

The production cooks along briskly, especially in the first act, where we get to know all the characters, their history and their relationships to people we can only imagine, but visible to them from Meredith's bedroom window. The second act slows down a bit with the appearance of the only male, a wedding guest named Tripp (B. Cooper Goldman), a soft-spoken, good-looking Lothario who soon finds promising rapport with Trisha.

The actors' Tennessee accents are both subtle and believable, especially as delivered by Eckstut, Poropudas and Gordon, and their attitudes are authentic — issues of importance to a reviewer who lived in Atlanta throughout the 1980s and early '90s. The characters in "Five Women in the Same Dress" aren't caricatures but complexly real people. The cast gets it all unassailably right — especially the finely honed Southern sense of absurdity, something that seems to elude many more experienced actors. How they do so is the wonder and magic of theater. Its subject matter and dialog aren't for children, but adults with a healthy appetite for comedy will love this show.